CERN’s Hadron Collider Research Fueled By OpenStack
July 2, 2013
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.
CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, is rebuilding its Large Hadron Collider and re-architecting its data center infrastructure on OpenStack Grizzly as it continues its pursuit of the Higgs Boson particle and other advanced physics. At the end of the process, it will be able to collect twice as much data from a research experiment in the collider as before, and that data will be uploaded to a "federated" Grizzly OpenStack cloud. Grizzly is the name of the OpenStack project’s seventh and latest release, which came out in April.
CERN’s federated cloud will encompass 15,000 servers in two locations, Budapest, Hungary, and Geneva, Switzerland. The collider is being rewired and rebuilt with stronger magnets to run at twice the power level at which it ran before, and that means, says Tim Bell, CERN infrastructure manager, it will generate twice as much data as it did when it was taken offline earlier this year, after a breakthrough in particle physics on March 14…
When the collider was shut down, it had succeeded in producing a collision between two proton streams, each powered by 3.5 trillion electron volts. Each such experiment yields two petabytes of data, with collectors running the data through filters to yield 20 GBs per second. The Grizzly OpenStack cloud will be collecting "at least twice that amount of data. It’s quite difficult to record data at that rate," Bell said in an interview prior to Monday’s announcement. Both the collider and the OpenStack clouds supporting it are scheduled to renew operation at the start of 2015…
Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cerns-hadron-collider-research-fueled-by/240157584